What Do We Mean by 'Scalable Engineering, Enabled'?

Buzzwords are a dime a dozen, especially in the tech sector, so some of you might be tempted to roll your eyes when you read taglines like ours: Scalable Engineering, Enabled. What does that even mean? What right does a small software start-up have to claim knowledge of engineering at scale? Why should you care? Well, I'll try to explain.

The Status Quo - Discrete Stages of Design

Engineering organizations have gotten very good at structuring their design processes to meet requirements and mitigate risk, especially in fields like aerospace where safety is so critical. They have checks, balances, redundancies, you name it, and they've figured out how to employ these tactics across hundreds, sometimes thousands of engineers working on dozens of large, complex projects. Given that context, one might argue that the realm of "scalable engineering" has long since been conquered by the big fish in the pond. But what about performance? What about cost? These metrics can suffer when the design process is too linear, too siloed, and too ad-hoc. More specifically, when simulation and design are treated as separate stages of the design process instead of tightly-coupled components, performance and cost cannot be optimized. That's where we we think we offer an attractive alternative to the status quo.

A New Paradigm - Simulation Driven Design

What does it look like to have simulation and design tightly-coupled? One solution that is growing in popularity is the idea that simulation needs to be more accessible to the designers, this is the "democratization" movement. Democratization of engineering analysis is an important piece of the puzzle that deserves its own series of blog posts, but it is still just one piece of many. Here's another idea, what about making design more accessible to the simulation experts? What if the same engineer who is most knowledgeable about the nuances of simulation and the physics of the application was enabled to do the design work? You might say that would be a waste of valuable time, a misallocation of specialized resources, but that would only be true if they were constrained to using the tools & processes of today. Imagine instead that you could take the energy and insight of that single engineer and scale it to be 10 times as productive. How about 100 times? 1000? What if, for example, an aerodynamicist could easily build a CAD model that is perfectly parameterized to explore the design space and robust enough to regenerate 10,000 different ways? What if the same engineer could effortlessly set-up a simulation stencil that could iterate, in a completely automated fashion, through a 1000 design points overnight? What if the engineer didn't have to build additional software to accomplish this, but could instead focus their time on solving the design problem at hand? That is what we mean by "Scalable Engineering, Enabled", and we believe it's the next big thing.

Charles is the Business Development & Sales Lead at Aerion Technologies, which is a made-up title that essentially means he is responsible for all of ATC's Sales & Marketing initiatives, but is not actually in charge of anyone. He likes his job, but given the choice he'd rather be mountain biking, snowboarding, eating food, or drinking beer.

In this blog we'll talk about our progress & plans, hopes & dreams, successes & failures. We'll discuss the state of the engineering software industry, where we think it is headed, and what that could mean. We'll invite comments, questions, concerns, critiques, and congratulations. If you think simulation has an important role to play in the future of engineering, then this blog is for you.